Category: politics

If Pete Rainey Had a Clue, He’d Put Cannabis Law Reform Before Hone Ma Heke

hone2

Pete Rainey needs to stop crying about Hone Ma Heke and support a policy that will actually benefit the people of Nelson. What Nelson needs isn’t to raise a lynch mob and go after a protester – it needs to legalise cannabis.

In few places on Earth does cannabis have more popular support than among the people of Nelson. This is a hugely pro-cannabis area, with the sentiment only getting stronger the further West from Nelson one goes. Almost everyone here smokes it – young, old or in between. You can see Bob Marley posters in several stores and a handful of others openly sell cannabis paraphernalia.

So a mayoral candidate that promoted such a thing would have the support of the locals.

Also, we need the money here in Nelson. It has been estimated by the Treasury that cannabis law reform would make the country $330,000,000 per year, roughly half of that savings from not enforcing cannabis prohibition and the other half from taxes. If the Nelson area has 1.5% of New Zealand’s population, it stands to reason that we would reap 1.5% of the savings of cannabis law reform.

This amounts to almost $5,000,000 per year.

With the proceeds from cannabis law reform alone, Nelson would save, in ten years, enough money to build a gondola that rivalled the biggest gondola in the world!

That’s the sort of vision Nelson needs – not petty hatred aimed at a guy already at the bottom of the ladder.

The War on Drugs Was Known to be a Failure Twenty Years Ago

drugwarfailure

Much recent media attention has focused on the question of whether the War on Drugs has failed in New Zealand. Amazingly, a review of Ben Vidgen’s 1999 book State Secrets suggests that the War on Drugs was widely known to be a failure since at least two decades ago, even at the highest political level.

One of the arguments that John Key has been rolling out to deny the need for cannabis law reform is that it “would send the wrong message”. Apparently his idea is that if cannabis was legalised in New Zealand many vulnerable people would interpret that as a green light to smoke as much of it as possible.

Leaving aside the obvious point that no-one in New Zealand who wants to smoke cannabis is waiting for permission from the government to do so, it’s interesting how much mileage conservatives have got out of that one bit of rhetoric.

On page 33 of Vidgen’s bestseller State Secrets it says that John Howard back in 1998 used the same rhetoric to stymie cannabis law reform in Australia. Noting that already in the late 1990s it was understood by intelligent people that “by removing the profit incentive associated with drug dealing, decriminalisation would, in effect, destroy the capital base from which organised crime’s influence originates,” the book describes how Howard rejected the idea on the grounds of “the wrong message”.

Perhaps depressingly, Vidgen’s book makes it clear that the Establishment has simply ignored the voices of reason for decades now. Writing that the best way to view drug use in society was as a “social and health problem”, it seems incredible that almost twenty years later it would be necessary to make the same arguments.

Given that the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party won 1.66% of the vote in the 1996 election, it’s a shame that we could so stubbornly remain deaf to the truth, even when doing so comes at horrendous expense.

Vidgen agrees with this column that the failure of the War on Drugs is deliberate. He points out in State Secrets that such talk inevitably gets dismissed as conspiracy theory, but that if an objective observer joins the dots it becomes apparent that the legal status of many drugs – cannabis in particular – affords opportunity for extralegal actors to profit immensely from their trafficking and sale.

Some say that intelligence agencies sell drugs in New Zealand to finance off-the-books operations. Probably most people would be horrified to know how deep the rabbit hole goes.

You Won’t Understand John Key on Cannabis Unless You Understand Sadism

john_key_fires_up_over_iraq_decision

Now that New Zealand has finally gathered the gumption to have a national discussion about cannabis, the end of prohibition is in sight. The reason why it was so hard to get a conversation about cannabis started is that prohibitionists have long known that as soon as it did, inevitably the forces of freedom would win, as they had both evidence and compassion on their side.

But what does compassion have to do with it?

As it turns out, everything. You simply cannot understand the cannabis law in New Zealand unless you understand the compassionate-malicious spectrum of human personality, for cannabis prohibition will not end in New Zealand until it is seen for what it is: naked sadism.

It’s time for a look into the ghoulish horrorscape that is the mind of a prohibitionist.

“In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism.” – H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken was an American philosopher-king active in the first half of the 20th century. Realising that satire was one of the only ways to get a complex message through the thick skulls of his fellow Americans, he took the piss out of the cultural peccadilloes of his time, one of the stupidest of which was alcohol prohibition.

In a small, self-published volume in 1926, Mencken observed that “Prohibition has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so vastly augmented the number of users.”

The infuriating thing for anyone who has tried to get the law to reflect justice and compassion, is that exactly the same is true of cannabis today.

What’s the past-year usage rate of cannabis in New Zealand, where growers are jailed? 14.6%.

What’s the past-year usage rate of cannabis in the Netherlands, where it’s sold openly? 5.4%.

That data is from 2008 – if you want something more recent, there’s a report that states teen cannabis use has not increased in Colorado since measures were taken to legalise it a few years ago.

It can be seen that cannabis prohibition has not reduced the number of people who use it – if the objective was to reduce the health problems that cannabis ostensibly causes, then prohibition is, prima facie, a failure. So why has the Drug War raged on for decades despite the lack of evidence that it is effective?

Because it is not effectiveness that is the issue.

Cannabis prohibition does not have to help the nation to be supported by prohibitionists. It only has to harm the sort of person who uses cannabis.

This is why John Key can so glibly claim that the Police are not really prosecuting anyone, and so there is no hurry to change the law – the Police are not prosecuting National voters. Most National voters own their own homes, and so can smoke cannabis in privacy away from people who might dob them in. Most Labour voters live in shared housing, and more often have to risk smoking in public.

Make no mistake: the point of the cannabis law is intentionally to fuck over the sort of people most feared by the control mechanism and its lackeys – the freespirited, the creative, the spiritual, the kind, the young, the rebel, the unbrainwashed.

Why is John Key vicious like this? Perhaps this is revenge of the nerds, Kiwi style. Key, like Peter Dunne, was severely bullied at school, and perhaps supporting cannabis prohibition is one way that they wreak their petty revenge on the braver kids who experimented with life rather than striving to get ahead.

Another possible explanation is the the old, uptight white male that John Key represents deeply resents the ruthless historical process that is stripping him of his privilege and is lashing out.

When I was a barman, the worst customers were not the young men who suffered most of the demonisation but the male menopausal men who felt their plummeting testosterone and the lack of physical dominance that came with it, and knew that their best days were in the past. Perhaps John Key is of an age where his erectile health is no longer reliable, and he bitterly resents the young people who know that using cannabis enhances the pleasure of lovemaking.

The truth is probably that cannabis prohibitionists are simply malicious, petty-minded bigots who support harm for harm’s sake, as long as it isn’t happening to them.